Rachel Maddow on Monday January 11 made the point that the US already regulates firearms and bullets. She uses Dick Cheney as an example of someone who voted in a small minority not to regulate plastic guns and cop killer bullets. Today we accept those regulations as well as regulations against rocket propelled grenade launchers and machine guns as part of what is necessary to live in society.
Nicholas Kristof starts with saying he "was given a .22 rifle for my 12th birthday." He further understands "one appeal of guns: they’re fun." Kristof then states an interesting fact
The authors of Freakonomics noted that a home with a swimming pool is considerably more dangerous for small children than a home with a gun. They said that 1 child drowns annually for every 11,000 residential pools, but 1 child is shot dead for every 1 million-plus guns.
I found this to be interesting. I would never have a residential pool, because I believe one should never ever swim alone. One does not always need a lifeguard, but one should never swim alone. Residential pools too easily enable swimming alone. I would recommend more heavily regulating residential pools, insisting on high fences, locked gates, and not accessible except through a gate and certainly not directly accessible from a house.
But this is not about swimming pools, this is about guns. Nicholas Kristof goes on to say:
All that said, guns are far more deadly in America, not least because there are so many of them. There are about 85 guns per 100 people in the United States, and we are particularly awash in handguns.
That amazes me. None of my friends have ever said anything to me about owning a gun. Only two relatives who had/have guns. One a cousin, has owned a gun. He owned a rifle for hunting deer. He lived in a small hamlet that was surrounded by farms and woods. His rifle was kept locked in a rack in his room. I never saw him carry it. The second is my brother in-law who occasionally goes hunting. I have never seen his rifle, though I have been to his house many times. He talks about hunting, not his rifle, and only then infrequently. So this 85 guns per hundred people is an amazing statistic to me.
Nicholas Kristof continues with:
Just since the killings in Tucson, another 320 or so Americans have been killed by guns — anonymously, with barely a whisker of attention. By tomorrow it’ll be 400 deaths. Every day, about 80 people die from guns, and several times as many are injured.
More people die in the US from gun shots everyday than US soldiers die in a week in Afghanistan and Iraq. I am not saying the US is more more dangerous than those countries. I remember during the Vietnam war when a similar statement was made that more people in the US die in automobile accidents every year than US soldiers were killed in a year in Vietnam.
The difference, though, is that we have regulated cars, passengers, and drivers. Seat belts are necessary. Also for babies and children we insist on additional protection. I hope in the near future anti-lock brakes and air bags will be mandatory. I would not dream of buying a car without both. I once drove off the road and an air bag prevented any serious injury. The car was totaled, I survived to drive another day.
Kristof continues with:
A careful article forthcoming in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine by David Hemenway, a Harvard professor who wrote a brilliant book a few years ago reframing the gun debate as a public health challenge, makes clear that a gun in the home makes you much more likely to be shot — by accident, by suicide or by homicide.
The chances that a gun will be used to deter a home invasion are unbelievably remote, and dialing 911 is more effective in reducing injury than brandishing a weapon, the journal article says. But it adds that American children are 11 times more likely to die in a gun accident than in other developed countries, because of the prevalence of guns.
We should think about this. To me this begs for gun regulation. So the question is what kind of regulation. Kristof directly addresses this question:
• Limit gun purchases to one per month per person, to reduce gun trafficking. And just as the government has cracked down on retailers who sell cigarettes to minors, get tough on gun dealers who sell to traffickers.
• Push for more gun safes, and make serial numbers harder to erase.
• Improve background checks and follow Canada in requiring a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun. And ban oversize magazines, such as the 33-bullet magazine allegedly used in Tucson. If the shooter had had to reload after firing 10 bullets, he might have been tackled earlier. And invest in new technologies such as "smart guns," which can be fired only when near a separate wristband or after a fingerprint scan.
This seems to me to be a reasonable starting point for gun regulation. As Kristof says at the end:
The best memorial would be to regulate firearms every bit as seriously as we regulate automobiles or toys.
I concur.
Comments are closed on this story.